


X&Y

by The_Cat_In_The_Hat



Category: Coldplay (Band)
Genre: Berrytin, M/M, Space AU, Weird Story?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23129053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Cat_In_The_Hat/pseuds/The_Cat_In_The_Hat
Summary: Chris had a mental breakdown after he lost his true love, and Guy tried to fix him by leading him to catch his emotions on the “Emotions-hunting Field” he designed.
Relationships: Guy Berryman/Chris Martin
Kudos: 4





	X&Y

**Author's Note:**

> This is for An. Happy birthday! 🎉

“Are you aware that emotions are touchable and have shapes?” Guy asks inadvertently while driving.  
“Well, I suppose. Depression has the shape of Initial Singularity and explodes when you touch it, then it expands to fill in your whole world. And happiness has irregular shape and changes every second, but at the same time it is...” Like always, when Chris receives a question he will not stop babbling about it.  
“Stop Chris, stop. You’re doing this again, taking all your imagination for granted.” Guy interrupts Chris.  
“That’s what I always do, right?” Chris shows that crafty smile he used to show when he realized that he might just offended someone. But Guy can see that Chris tries so hard to show that smile to assure Guy that he is doing just fine, Guy can’t help but feeling sad suddenly.  
“Yeah, that’s what you always do and always did, because that was effortless and you would leave all the intractable work to me.” Guy tries to be peaky just like he was with Chris to get rid of that unreasonable sadness.  
“That’s how we cooperated, remember?” Chris turns his head to look at Guy in his eyes.  
“How could I forget? You’re so intolerable.” Guy smiles, shaking his head. Good old days. He then says this silently in his mind.  
“Oh, don’t be mad Guy.”  
“I’m not mad. It’s just I want to surprise you this time but you’re always a step ahead of me. And it’s hard to always follow you, not for me, but for you. I know you’re tired and intense, that’s why I want you to loose that string and follow me this time.”  
He stops for a few seconds and then tries to fill this blank with what he would normally say.  
“So just shut up and fasten your seatbelt Chris. Don’t try to be a leading actor again.”  
“Aye, aye. Captain Berryman.”

Silence is always better between the two of them than endless conversations, since they both are real talkers therefore make silence precious. Guy really enjoys such moment when he is with Chris, who is so tired that he falls asleep next to Guy quickly. Silence mixed with soft sound of Chris breathing gives Guy enough time to flash back to when he and Chris were still in college.

Human being had to enlarge their living space into outer space centuries ago after earth was destroyed by an asteroid. However, the difficulty of finding a planet as perfect as earth for human being was beyond imagination, so they decided to build their own home planets. This was when planet-building school first emerged.  
Chris and Guy first met when they were both freshmen in the best planet-building college which is called Coldplay Planet Building Cosmouniversity. They were in the same faculty but they majored in different specialties, Chris studied Design of Outer-Planet and Guy Design of Inner-Planet. These majors might be a little bit abstract for ancient earth residents to understand, well then you may regard Chris as a Landscape Designer and Guy an Engineer. Chris learned to design everything that might be on the surface of a planet, including water system, mountain system, ecosystem, atmosphere and everything that you know on earth and everything you don’t know and can’t imagine. This sounds very romantic, right? Just let imagination take control and see where it leads to.  
But actually, yes and no, this is not as simple and romantic as it seems to be. Dreamers exist, meaning that dream-builders exist as well, since dreams are all driven by dream-builders as you may know. And this was what Guy learned in college, to be an excellent dream-builder. He needed to design the whole drive system inside a planet to fulfill the blueprints of Outer-Planet designers, which were under most circumstances, unrealistic, impractical, fanciful and ‘imaginary’. He needed to know how to place every single gear inside the planet in order to make it rotate and function precisely and delicately as the outer-system demanded.  
The Outer-Planet designers use their intuition and sensitivity, while the Inner-Planet designers use their intelligence and sensibility. This might be one of the reasons why Chris and Guy were always picky with each other, though they did respect each other and would recognize and admit the excellence of each other. Chris thought Guy was an indifferent person with impeccable glow shining like a piece of metal did, while Guy regarded Chris as a piece of flashy candy wrap paper, beautiful but useless, which would eventually be thrown away. But there was never an actual fight because one of them was a confrontational kind of person but the other was avoidant. Despite of their seeming dislike for each other, even themselves had to admit that there was chemistry between them as designers and their cooperation was magical. They won the prize of Design of Most Livable Planet for their graduation project and both graduated with the highest honor. Even so, they traveled on parting ways after graduation. 

And then Guy met Chris at a galaxy interchange for the first time so many years after their graduation. By accident, as he told Chris why he was there. 

Technically, meeting Chris at that place was not a coincidence, because someone told Guy what happened before, but none of them was specific. Guy only knew pieces of the stories like “Chris, a man who would cry over a dead bird under the blooming flowers, didn’t shed a single drop of tear this time”, or “He didn’t say anything to me when I visited him, he just sat there, staring at the air. Can you believe this? A man who would greet to the postman every morning saying nothing under such circumstance?”, or “I think he’s broken this time, not financially but mentally” and “He’s leaving this sad planet tomorrow”.  
If Guy had to say, it was a half-coincidence. He was passing that galaxy interchange anyway, so why not stopping by to check if Chris was doing well. And there they were, that was how they met.  
Guy saw Chris the minute he entered the waiting hall. He was sitting in the corner alone and looked like exactly how he looked like when he was in college, wearing baggy pants and sport shoes and carrying an extremely huge and shabby canvas backpack, in which according to Guy’s guess were all his belongings. But something was different, even Guy hadn’t said anything to Chris he still perceived it.  
Chris seemed soulless, or dysfunctional to better describe.  
Guy hesitated, he didn’t know if it was a good time for a reunion but he always had this strange protectiveness toward Chris and he never knew why. It stung his heart to see such a fragile and unguarded Chris, so he eventually walked toward Chris slowly, preparing a speech for this accidental meet.  
To his surprise, he pretended to be surprised to see Chris and was about to explain why he was there when Chris slowly raised up his head, trying to identify who was talking to him and suddenly said with uncertainty and hesitation in his voice, “I think I lost my true love, Guy”.  
It was Guy’s turn to be speechless. Chris looked down on the floor again after saying that and played with his fingers like he was a little boy who did something wrong. Guy was right, Chris had a mental breakdown because of unbearable heartbreak and sadness. He was dysfunctional and he surely could not handle and process all his heavy and sophisticated emotions at that time. He was broken and he needed to be fixed. As an excellent engineer, Guy was amazing at fixing machines but not person, especially when this person was Chris. He didn’t know what to do nor to say, so he just stood there. And standing there without knowing where to put his hands was not something a man as cool as Guy would normally do. He asked Chris where he intended to go, and Chris said the name of a place far away. Guy knew clearly that he shouldn’t let Chris started his upcoming heartbroken journey alone before he was fixed, but Guy still didn’t know how to do it, so he remained silent and awkwardly stood in front of Chris.  
He stared at Chris’ messy curly hair and then remembered his first ever design after graduation.

“Emotions-hunting Field it’s called. This is the first planet I designed from inner to outer.” Guy says this while they stand together in their space suits, with butterfly catchers in their hands, facing an endless green undersea meadow. The whole planet is actually an undersea meadow, where grasses are as soft as the feathers which are close to the skin of newborn ducks and move tenderly and slowly to the rhythm of undersea waves.  
“So, what should we do? Running around like when were children and trying to catch our feelings like we tried to catch butterflies?” Chris waves the butterfly catcher in his hand turns his head to Guy to find an answer but finds out that Guy is not in his view.  
“No Chris, just relax and lie down with me. We don’t go around and find our emotions, they come to us instead. This is how they work. We do nothing but wait, you only catch them when they come.” Guy has already lay down, closing his eyes and putting his left arm under his head as an arm-pillow.  
Guy hears the noise Chris makes when he tries to lie down with Guy and then silence again. Waves whisper to their ears, telling the secrets of the ocean. Time swims slowly in the water, making Guy feel so safe and comfortable that he nearly falls asleep when he hears Chris saying something.  
“This must be what huge and beautiful whales see underwater in their everyday life, how wonderful it is.”  
Guy opens his eye, seeing that the lights of an eternal sunset infiltrate into water and sparkles like shredded gold. The view is stunning, but not as stunning as Chris’ eyes. Guy indulges himself into that ocean blue for a while without being noticed before Chris suddenly says that there comes an emotion.  
That emotion looks like a jellyfish which is transparent, with exploratory tentacles waving, trying to touch anything comes near it.  
“I have a feeling that this is my emotion and its name is curiosity, I don’t know why but I just know it.” Chris sits up and traps that jellyfish-like emotion with his butterfly catcher gently.  
“Because it is. Tell me what you are curious about then.” Guy sits up with Chris and observes his emotion.  
“This planet is what I’m curious about. This is so not you, you are cool and fancy from the first day I knew you. But don’t get me wrong, it’s the most amazing planet I have ever been. I mean, how on earth did you come up with such an exquisite idea?”  
“You won’t believe, but actually you are my inspiration.” Guy being shy is a rare occasion, it’s once in a blue moon. “I had always been amazed by you when we were in college, how can you have such abundant emotions and feelings which change every second. I’ve wanted to feel how you feel and see what you see, thus I designed this place.”  
Chris looks slightly surprised, “but I thought you are the moody one.”  
“I suppose so, and that’s why I don’t value my own feelings so much. Look! There come another one.”  
This one belongs to Guy and it’s his worry about Chris, so Chris tells him what happened exactly.  
Chris’ lover was a different species which will keep invisible until they meet their true love. Chris met her long time ago when he was hiking in the mountain, she suddenly appeared and Chris was so terrified that he rolled down the hillside. She ran to Chris, reaching out her hand to pull him up, giggling all the time. They fell deeply in love with each other.  
Then one day when Chris found out that she became a little transparent when they realized things between them slowly went wrong. Maybe because they were both workaholics, or maybe because they always tried to be nice with each other and hid their real feelings from each other sometimes. They tried to fix the small crack but it was too late. She became invisible again and disappeared all of a sudden just like how she appeared.  
Chris tells Guy this story calmly like he is telling a story of others but not himself. Guy knows this is because Chris’ emotion feedback mechanism has not restarted yet and it needs time.  
Then Chris catches gratitude, weightless sorrow, remote yearn and transparent affection, while Guy catches caterpillar-shaped regret, infinite tenderness that looks like clouds and a black box with a question mark on it. Nothing thereafter.

Chris doesn’t know what that box is and what’s in it and Guys knows fairly well, but he has no intention to tell Chris because that’s unspoken love. Guy realized when they were catching emotions after so long that the seeming dislike between him and Chris is in fact the icings on donuts. He likes Chris from the bottom of his heart and is grateful for his existence and appearance in his life. He’s not as cold and indifferent as Chris considered him to be, he just wanted to stay silent when he was with Chris because he wanted to feel with his whole body and soul. He actually understands Chris from inside out and that’s the reason why he knows how to drive Chris’ colorful dreams with his rhythmic and calm paces, for which he fell at first sight. 

“Guy, it might sound weird for you but I think I realized something vaguely. I was like a machine filled with all kinds of garbage but when you became the person in control everything changed. You assembled different parts and powered me up and voila, I suddenly turned into a candy machine. You pulled the handle, red yellow and green candies came out. This is how I feel.”

Chris is always that same Chris who will say his feelings out plainly, so frank that he makes Guy feel bare sometimes. Guys knows that he does not need to give Chris response and he believes that Chris feels the same way. They both understand that there is no other possibility outside that black box. Perhaps before the beginning, at the starting point of a starting point, the possibility of a caterpillar breaking out of the cocoon as a butterfly existed when everything still stays compressed inside the Initial Singularity. But after they’ve been going through all the things ever happened to them, when they find out that they can hear the sound of sea waves under their fingernails after they’ve jumped into oceans, they decide tacitly that what’s unspoken stays unspoken. The caterpillar stays a caterpillar for all its lifelong. Neither of them will open the black box because every possibility exists when the box stays unopened.

Chris catches his last emotion after a while, which is a long-lasting sorrow. Guy realizes that this is a sign of the restarting of Chris’ emotion feedback mechanism. Now he could eventually give Chris a ride to the galaxy Chris intended to go to and let him go, even though this means Chris has to continue his journey alone. But Guy is not worried about Chris anymore, because he stuffed a pair of wings inside Chris’ backpack.


End file.
